Recently I had one question in a seminar about finding the correct information in the IFC structure.
Personally, I am familiar with most of the entities and especially their enumerations, but what about people who are starting to discover this new realm and especially the non-English speakers?
I am familiar about the possibility to find out the type of Entity on the website, but what about their Enumerations? How does one find the correct entity with its enumeration? In some cases, the destination product lies not within the entity but rather in the level of its enumeration. In some cases, only by reading the description of that enumeration, the person could identify that it is the correct one. The name of the enumeration for the non-English speakers is not immediately self-explanatory.
Is there a way or a strategy to make the schema more available or better searchable up to the level of their enumerations? There is the list of TypeEnums, but the list is not flattened to be able to search the whole documentation.
Any suggestions?
Not sure if it helps, but I had a similar question a few months ago:
I tried the DDS IFC Schema Navigator recommended in one of the replies, and it is a fantastic tool for someone newer to the IFC structure. Accessing the enums of an entity is also just a click away once you have found the IFC entity you are interested in.
thank you for your reply…
navigating through the database and Psets would be still manageable, since one can open the bsI website and do a FindSearch. You get these in a list.
But the Enumerations are found only in the level of the entity, which means that the entity should be opened, in order to see what enumeration does it have.
I was hoping to have an online database, where the users could search not only through the Entities and Psets, but all the way to the enumerations. It would be helpful if the search could encompass also the enumerations to get the best results. Sometimes the result lies in the enumeration and not in the entity.
Rather than copying everything again in some database, the whole “live” documentation is now in a Github repository and has already a quite usable search. It seems only logic to look at expanding that search and stick to the single source of documentation for IFC.
This way, you don’t need to know where that semantics lives, as long as the term you are using it is within the bSDD, whether through the IFC 4.3. terminology or other regional, local, or domain-related taxonomies, such as BIM classifications or Property Sets.
